Family and Food

I don't know about y'all, but that about sums up our Thanksgiving week!  And it was awesome!  I'm so happy that we able to be around family for Thanksgiving.  It's one of those holidays that we don't usually travel for since we're saving vacation time for Christmas, so I was happy to have family come to us this time!

Hubby's parents, Gran-Jan and Papa, were expecting Hubby's brother and his three kids to come on Tuesday.  I didn't know they thought that and I had put it on the calendar that they were coming on Sunday night.  Hubby then told me that they had decided to surprise the grandparents and come on Sunday instead of Tuesday.  So the event was erased off the calendar and we very carefully explained to the girls that as long as they didn't flat out say that their uncle was coming on Tuesday that they weren't lying.  It didn't come up that often, but when it did the girls cleared the room so they wouldn't have to talk about what day the rest of the family was coming in.  I thought for a while that Papa had figured it out.  He made several comments wondering why they couldn't come earlier in the week.  But when they opened our door Sunday night, Gran-Jan and Papa both had looks of shock on their faces.  It was awesome! 

Unfortunately, Hubby had to work on Monday and Tuesday, but he did take some time to go bowling with us on Tuesday.  We weren't going to go bowling.  Have you been lately?  It is expensive!  But being the smart consumer that I am I decided to check their website and see if they had any coupons.  You'll never guess what I found!  Coupons!  We were able to bowl 2 games each plus shoe rental for $7.  A very reasonable price.  We all had a really good time.  We laugh at each other too much for anyone to take the game too seriously!

I had planned for Wednesday to be a stay at home and finish baking and making everything I could for Thursday kind of day.  But we ended up buying a pumpkin and pecan pie because I don't have any long standing family recipes for those, and Sam's pies really are good.  Then Papa brought home a chocolate pie from the store and I figured between those pies and the pumpkin roll I already had made in the freezer that we would have enough desserts.  And I changed my mind about the rolls I wanted to make, so I had nothing left to make on Wednesday.  So we spent the day at home just relaxing while Hubby worked.

Breakfast!

Thursday Papa made breakfast for us all.  I was really happy about that!  Way less work for me.  And I really didn't have all that much to do for lunch.  We bought a fried turkey.  There was no way we could even fit a 20 lb turkey in my little oven, much less cook it and anything else.  The ham went in my new crock-pot that Papa bought for me due to the lid on my old one cracking like a windshield. 

We were blessed with friends from church giving us a cooked sweet potato casserole so I took that off my list of things to make.  Gran-Jan handled the stuffing and gravy.  Good thing too cause I don't like it at all, much less want to make it!  So that pretty much left me with rolls and green bean casserole to make.  Yipee for not having to kill myself making a bunch of food!  Unfortunately, the one thing I was really looking forward to, my pumpkin roll, was thrown away.  Hubby thought it was something else and tossed it, I don't even know how long ago.  He felt terrible.  I was sad, mainly because I felt like I wasn't really contributing anything noteworthy to the meal, but I got over it.  As for Hubby, I'm enjoying bringing it up every once in a while.  That will probably continue for at least a year, with the possibility of it becoming a family joke.  And if you don't think that is that big of a deal, ask my youngest brother how he likes eggnog creamer.  That happened over a decade ago and we bring it up every Christmas!

Thankful for a school table so we had enough seats for everyone!

Friday we decided to go see a movie.  Hubby's brother and his kids went to see Catching Fire since they are all older and didn't want to see the Disney movie with the rest of us.  We invited friends from church to come see it with us.  Silly me thought that since it was Black Friday that there wouldn't be that long of a line for Frozen.  Yeah, we got there 30 minutes before the show we wanted to see and it was sold out.  Luckily, we didn't have anywhere to be so we just bought tickets for the next show, went and ate some fries at McD's next door and then stood in line for 45 minutes to get good seats.  Normally I wouldn't enjoy myself standing in line for a movie, but we were with family and friends so the time passed quickly.  By the way, Frozen is officially my new favorite movie!  The best part was at the end when they kissed and Baby Girl #4, who was sitting on Hubby's lap said very loud, "But they're not even married!"  That's right baby, you just keep on thinking along those lines!

9 kids total

Saturday the brother and his kids had to head home.  I heard he made some sort of comment about us not fixing breakfast for them before they left.  All I have to say is that I have been a member of his family for over 13 years.  He should have known better!

Sunday we enjoyed spending one last day with Gran-Jan and Papa.  Lunch was an amazing pork roast that was given to us by friends again.  It was such a huge blessing to not have to worry about cooking!  I hope I'm able to emulate that kind of thoughtfulness and caring to others.  Well, to others besides my whiny brother-in-law!  After dinner Hubby took Gran-Jan and Papa to New Orleans to stay at a hotel since their flight left early Monday morning.  #1 and #2 had a hard time saying good-bye; they are starting to realize that it is no fun being away from family.  But we're thankful for the time that we did get to spend with everyone.  I'm not going to lie, having an extra 6 people in the house for a week was stressful at times, but I'm just glad I actually like all 6 of those people.  And I would rather be stressed having extra people in our home than be sad because we weren't able to be around any family at all!

The "I'm so late I should almost wait till the end of this week" Weekly Wrap-Up

I had no idea I was so far behind on writing.  I knew if I didn't get caught up now I wouldn't get caught up until after the first of the year so here we are.

Last week school was school.  #3 is doing a little bit better in Math.  She gets the ideas separately, but when you put them all together she has a hard time remembering how to do them.  I have decided that she just needs more practice.  So we've moved on and she'll continue to practice these problems with the review that is written in the curriculum.

#2 is not going to get through the IEW book by the end of the year.  I knew that when I decided to break up Language Arts and IEW into different semesters, but as I was thinking about it this last week it was really starting to bother me.  I started trying to figure out what it would take to continue IEW into the new semester and play catch up with Language Arts until I finally had to remind myself that I didn't have to finish the book each time.  It really bothers me to leave books unfinished, but I'm going to deal with it.  My plan is a good plan and I'm going to stick with it.  For this week at least....

We actually did not do school work on Thursday because our homeschool group was having our Thanksgiving get-together.  Of which Hubby and I got exactly zero pictures.  Fortunately, the Mom who puts all our field trips together has a blog all about our adventures, and she took lots of pictures!  You can see them here.   We had an amazing time!  They had different booths for the kids to go to.  The girls got to lean how to make butter from whipping cream, make a ship and "sail" it, make their own candles, learn to tie different knots, learn a little bit about navigation skills, and make a picture of a ship from their hand prints.  After all that, we got to play and visit and eat.  The weather was perfect and we had an amazing time.  This homeschool group has been a real blessing for myself and for our girls.

Pizza and a movie first!

Our friends who have the girls who match up in age perfectly with our girls are also part of this group so they were all excited to see each other.  The other Mom and I were pestered questioned many times about when they were going to be able to get together to play and have a sleep over.  We determined that the only time we were really going to be able to get them together was that weekend so we had their three girls come over Friday and stay the night.  I'm very happy to say that these girls are ones that having all three of them over wasn't any more work than having just one over.  All of them are polite and well-behaved.  All the girls got along all night long, no fighting or ugliness or exclusions.  I was very thankful for this since Hubby had to go visit a church family who lost a loved one that night so it was just me with them for the most part.  No one got a decent amount of sleep that night, but that is what sleep overs are all about.  And also why we only do them on Friday nights and not very often at that.  They all had a great time.  And now I am happy knowing that the next sleep over happens at their house!  :)

After their "dance routine"

So that was last week.  Two more days and I'll be writing about this week.  And I'm eventually going to write about our awesome camping trip.  Hopefully this week.  We'll see.

A family of 4

We are back from our trip for Thanksgiving.  We went up to one of my brothers' homes, which is about half way between us and my parent's place.  All my siblings except for one were there and only one sister-in-law wasn't able to come.  My parents were both there as well as my Grandpa.

I have actually been really looking forward to being together again.  I saw everyone at my Grandma's funeral, but I was ready for us to be together to have some fun.  But I was also dreading it a little bit, just because I thought it would be hard to see Grandpa there without Grandma.

But it was actually ok.  I thought about Grandma a lot, but didn't have a lot of time to spend missing her.  We ate a lot, played a lot of games, the girls got to ride the four wheelers, and just generally enjoyed being together.  We played 9 holes of Frisbee golf, and that was actually a lot of fun.  It was the first time I've ever played and I think we'll be doing it again! 

I, of course, forgot to take pictures.  I'm really bad about that.  So no pictures to show all the fun we had.  You'll have to take my word for it! 

My parents took Baby Girls #3 & 4 back home with them for two weeks.  #3 could have cared less.  She kept telling us, "See you in two weeks!"  I'm sure she'll be ready to come home, but she was so excited to be able to go to Grammy and Pappy's for a while without the older sisters.  #4 wasn't quite as sure about it, but I have no doubt that she'll love the time she spends there too.

It's only been about a day that we haven't had them, but I do miss them a little.  I'm not going to lie--the quiet and the fact that the older two are almost completely self-sufficient has been really nice.  Hubby and I are looking forward to getting to do some things with #1 and #2 that we normally couldn't with the younger girls.  But our family just isn't complete with only four of us.

We'll go back to my brother's house in two weeks and switch out the girls.  Then the older two get to go to the grandparents and we'll have the younger two here.  I'm not so sure I'm looking forward to going back to having just two little ones, but oh well.  It won't be forever!

In the meantime, the older girls are going to help me decorate for Christmas, we're going to go get a tree this weekend, going to a movie and Hubby and I are going on a date.  And that is just this week--we'll have to see what next week holds!